


Expect the Unexpected

by mitspeiler



Series: Cardcaptor Blood Opera! [1]
Category: CLAMP - Works, Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Awesome, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Crack, Hella, Other, Punishment, magical girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 03:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2254407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitspeiler/pseuds/mitspeiler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sakura becomes too busy (or too afraid) to perform her duties, Tomoyo takes it upon herself to become a Cardcaptor!  Hilarity ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expect the Unexpected

Tomoyo was waiting out in the dark.  Her waist-length black hair waved in an errant breeze.  Her eyes, big and purple, sparkled in the starlight.  In her left hand, she held a camera and in her right, an adorable magical girl dress.  It was so precious, you don’t even know.  Whoever wore this dress would be the prettiest pinkest fairy princess in the entire universe, while still having like the mobility to chase supernatural monsters around the city and, through a clever trick of taylortry, somehow not flash their panties at the whole town when flying on the Sealing Wand.  The camera was the latest in cutting edge video camera technologies.

The dress was intended for her best friend Sakura.  Tonight, as on many other nights, the two of them would be hunting the magical Clow cards.  The Thunder Card, a particularly dangerous beast, was on the prowl in this dark, nearly abandoned neighborhood (seriously not even a vending machine around here, was this region _radioactive?_ ).

Sakura wasn’t there.  Tomoyo sighed.  This had been happening more and more recently.  She remembered back to the first night when it had been new and exciting, and squeed to herself at how adorable her friend had looked in that outfit.  “Like a beautiful ballerina,” she sighed, smiling so wide that the dark dangerous alley lit up.  Then she thought about how inferior that gown was to the one in her hands (that first one had a meager wing motif; this one had a _full set of motherfucking fairy wings attached omg she would **die** )_.  There was nothing to it.  She was going to go and call Sakura right now.

Tomoyo sprinted out of the alley and across the street, flipping on her camera and turning it on herself.  She let out another gorgeous smile, eyes closed like the kawaiiko she was.  “Sakura has been being silly lately and forgetting our card catching dates.  I’m going to call her just in case!”

The lass scampered into a phone booth, because it was the fucking 90s, and set her camera up onto one of the metal beams, setting it _just so,_ making sure to get a charming angle of her face as she primly dialed the phone.  It rang twice and then Sakura’s voice chimed through.  “Hello?” she sounded bored, and a little stressed.

“HI!” Tomoyo declared.  “Sakura, you didn’t show up _again_ , we need to capture these cards, and _I_ need to capture you doing it~!  How else am I going to become an award winning director?  And also save the world and junk?”  She had recently decided to string together all her favorite Sakura recordings into a coherent narrative to one day unleash upon the world.  Otherwise, it would just sit in her closet (of course she watched the footage again and again whenever she could; Sakura was just that amazing and powerful and beautiful and _aaahhhhh_ (✿◠‿◠) ).

“Oh,” said Sakura, sounding a little crestfallen.  “I forgot that was today...look I’m gonna need to make a raincheck, okay?”

Tomoyo giggled to herself.  “Oh sweetheart, you’re so funny.  It’s almost as if you forgot that the Thunder Card is a giant wolf made of plasma that can seriously injure and even kill people, not to mention knock out the power grid and other damage to the infrastructure.”

“Oh haha,” Sakura said drily, voice crackling slightly with static.  Because it was the goddamn 90s.  “I mean, I know  that this job is important, and I also love hanging out with you, but I’m just _sooooo_ busy!”

Tomoyo twisted her lip.  “You’re like ten.”

It sounded like Sakura’d just thrown her arms into the air and fallen back onto her mattress, but Tomoyo could never be sure.  “I just wanna focus on my career right now.”

“You’re like _ten_.” Tomoyo insisted.

I promise I’ll go card captoring when I can!” Sakura countered as if not having heard her.  “I really wish I had no social life but I do and that’s terrible.”  Over the phone, Tomoyo could hear the _Sailor Moon_ theme starting up.  She could just barely hear Kero saying something about popcorn, meaning there was no one else in there with her.

“But I’m already _here~_!” Tomoyo whined, stamping her foot.  She lowered the receiver towards the ground so that Sakura could hear the foot stamping.  “I am ready and just so keyed up to record you fighting that monster, I am even recording myself yelling at you so future generations will know how much you _stink!”_

Sakura groaned.  “I’m sorry I got you all excited for this campaign but I swear to God, it’s going to happen!  Really!”

Tomoyo hissed into the receiver, _“your beautiful face conceals a soul that is rotten and full of lies.”_ Raising her voice, she cut of Sakura before she could retaliate, “AND YOU STILL OWE ME A BIRTHDAY PRESENT!” Then she slammed the handset back into the hook, a  great and satisfying pleasure that children of the next century will never know.  Then she groaned, biting her lip almost to bleeding, drumming her feet on the floor as she suppressed a tantrum.  “I am so yandere right now it _hurts_ ,” she said, wibbling with painful pleasure.

Tomoyo rolled up her sleeves and put on a determined expression.  Then she unrolled her sleeves because that would make changing awkward.  Within seconds she had changed into the magical girl outfit.  She looked like the very embodiment of kawaii wrapped in a rainbow made from shades of pink.  “Let’s do this...shit,” she said, the word “shit” uttered under her breath.  This was still technically a kid’s show regardless of how subtly gay everyone was.

The Thunderbeast Raiju appeared in a burst of white light, a mass of ball lightning descending from the heavens, striking the center of the street in front of Tomoyo and lingering for a moment.  Then the glowing ball, too bright to look directly into, seemed to uncurl itself like a nightflower, into an enormous form.  It was like a wolf, but the size of a horse, with claws like daggers and fangs like scimitars.  His fur was needles, and his body crackled pulsed, phasing back and forth like a an image on a staticky TV screen, something which Tomoyo had a fucking lot of knowledge about, it being the 90s.

Raiju roared, his white eyes wide and pulsing with electricity.  He took a step and blue sparks radiated from his claws across the pavement like a spider-web.  Tomoyo gasped, and turned her camera the fuck on.  “You are gorgeous, in like, an ugly way,” she said, adjusting the focus.

The beast snarled; its slobber spattered on the floor and dissipated as yellow sparks.  Raiju took a step forward, muscles tensing, needle-fur laying back, a snarl in its throat rumbling through the air and into Tomoyo’s bones like, _like thunder_ —

“Force know my plight! Release the Light! Lightning!”  A burst of yellow light streaked across Tomoyo’s vision, flooding the video screen with static as it screamed into Raiju.  With a roar, he collapsed into a formless mass of white plasma, entangling with the yellow lightning.  The two opposing energies writhed in a huge ball that skipped and sputtered across the street like a lump of sodium on the surface of a water bucket before crashing through a wooden fence and safely exploding in someone else’s yard.  

Tomoyo whooped, pumping her fist into the air.  “I have no idea what just happened,” she said, turning the camera on herself, “but it was cool!  I think Sakura may have finally grown a pair of ovaries and realized what our love is all about—”

This was sadly not true, she realized, as a grim faced boy descended from a nearby rooftop, alighting with the grace of a heron.  His hair and eyes were light brown, and he carried a white jian in his left hand with a golden hilt.  His clothes were green and flamboyant, though he wore them with dignity.  Tomoyo glared sideways at him.  “You’re not who I was expecting,” she pouted.

“Aren’t you going to capture it?” he asked, a distasteful look on his face.  “Now would be a great time.”

Tomoyo flashed him a smile full of faux-innocence.  “I can’t actually do that, I’m just filling in because my friend, the actual Card Captor, is behaving like a butt.  She thinks she’s important, but not in the same way that I do, and that is currently creating tension between us.  I figured that I would go out and try to catch this card, get really hurt but not die, and thereby force her into action out of guilt if not out of a sense of real responsibility.  Emotional manipulation is a tool that I am not above sinking to in order to achieve what I want, and what I want is for Sakura-chan to try out my outfits and look like the most kawaii of all moes for all of time, just for me and no one else.  I am saying this because I think you’re a very handsome, dashing individual, and, being skilled at magic, probably a decent rival for Sakura-sama.  These sorts of things though, with two such passionate individuals put into tension with each other, tend to transform into either bloodshed or romances.  I am really worried about this second one currently because my darling precious baby Sakura-dono is growing apart from me and she _still hasn’t given me my birthday present I am going to die._  So, all that said I’m going to have to ask you to take your pretty little shota ass out of town as fast as you can be followed by an angry pack of attack dogs, because no amount of magic can protect you from the world’s greatest superpower, that is, the power of money, and let me tell you right now that this bitch (here she made a sassy, flourishing gesture towards her body) is _loaded to hell and back she’s got fucking million yen notes for toilet paper and enough antique gold ryos to knock over a train by just laying them on the tracks.  She would not even care to pick them up after motherfucker and just watch all the helpless people scream and die in the accident. **Why are you still here? Are you retarded or something?  Or are you just lost?  Well let me tell you right now the way out is back the way you came.  Leave the card catching to me and Sakura-chan-sama-sempai-san-kami and just go right the fuck back to China before I lose my cool up in here because no basic bitch little shotacon chinaman is gonna take my sunshine away.”**_ (O‿O✿)

Is what she thought.  What she said was, “Nope, I’ve got no magic whatsoever.”  She strode towards the boy with her winningest smile and said, “why doesn’t a big strong hero like you teach me some?”  She put her hand on his bicep and gave him her most melting puppy dog stare; her eyes may well have doubled in size and literally turned into liquid to accomplish the feat.

For his part, the boy looked like he was going to vomit and die of heatstroke all at once.  What was this creature and why was he feeling so incredibly strange all over his body?  “Just take out your wand,” he said, gulping, heat rising even further in his face as he realized that that could be misinterpreted, “or whatever magic tool,” he finished lamely.

“I don’t have one of those,” Tomoyo said brightly.  “Just a ¥4 million camera and a lot of chutzpah,” she said with a determined grin.

Behind the burning fence, Raiju reformed and howled, and then everything happened at once.

In some higher plane of existence, a devastatingly handsome ghost gazed down at his descendants with disappointment.  To be sure that his eyes weren’t deceiving him, he removed his glasses, wiped them clean, and replaced them, brushing aside a lock of luxurious black hair as he did so.  Nope, nothing had changed.

On the one hand his chosen successor, Sakura, related by spirit if not by blood, was sitting in her pajamas eating ice cream and watching anime with the Beast of the Seal.  She pretended to be busy to hide her fear at the momentous task before, a task which she herself foolishly embarked upon.  Clow Reed clicked his tongue.

On the other hand, there was Syaoran.  He was a distant cousin on Reed’s mother’s side, but so were a ton of other people and he had never considered them as anything other than a Christmas card list.  This kid was rude and melancholy and self absorbed.  He certainly had the talent, but without some serious character development Reed doubted he’d do much good for anyone if he had the Clow Cards.  Really, hindsight being 20/20, the best choice for successor would have been his dumb friend Meilin, and Clow Reed hated Meilin.  Where the hell did she even come from?  She’s not even canon, just something they made up for the show so they could have a love triangle, the reverberations of Twilight reaching back through time and affecting things in the 90s.  But she didn’t know any magic, and she was far away right now.  He sighed.

The kids were in danger, and he’d feel bad if he had to watch his family bury a nephew so young, so drastic measures had to be taken.  He pointed a finger at Tomoyo’s camera.  There was a child with chutspah!  “Whosoever wields this camera, if she be worthy, shall wield the power of the Clow,” he intoned, the etherium vibrating with the force of his majesty.  Like a comet, a bolt of pure magic shot from his finger and pierced the veil between worlds, smiting the camera.

Tomoyo would die recording.  Hopefully Sakura would see it, and be stirred by her friend’s death into action, like Achilles.  “You’re gonna win me a posthumous Pulitzer and make my bae a hero,” she purred as she looked through the lens into the Thunder Beast’s gullet.  It seemed however, that time had slowed.

To her left, the boy had raised his sword, which was beginning to spark with his own lightning.  “Silly idiot,” she said, “lightning against lightning?  Have you ever even _played_ Pokemon?”  He had not.  It wasn’t out yet.  Tomoyo’s dad got her the beta though, if you were wondering.

The wolf was moving like molasses, somehow his electric fur was discharging at less than the speed of light.  “This is weird,” Tomoyo muttered to herself, reaching out to touch.  It hurt, but it wasn’t an asshole about it like normal electric shocks.

It was then that she noticed the plethora of new buttons on her camera, each of which was glowing gently and seemed to have a mixture of European and Asiatic symbols floating just above their surface.  The entire machine had changed, and was now made of plates of shiny pearlescent-blue metal decorated with gold wire.  “How very shoujo,” she said appreciatively.  “Like, the good kind of shoujo with elegant gothic lolitas and valiant knights and really, really _pretty_ people, that kind of stuff, not random generic girl-porn.”  She felt that self-censorship was no longer in her best interest; the rules were changing.  She set her jaw and straightened her back, making her fake fairy wings flare out.  Examining the camera, she found a button that would take and print stills.  She aimed it in front of her like a gun, almost sticking her hand in Raiju’s jaws (even now still dripping electrical drool), and said, “Thunder! Release and Dispel!  Return to your power confined!” And clicked the button, muttering “eat this motherfucker,” as she did.

The Thunder Beast was sucked up and absorbed into the camera lens like viscous goop into a vacuum cleaner.  It still had mass, Tomoyo noted as the weight slammed into her hands and almost threw her to the ground.  The seams of the camera leaked light and she was afraid for a second that it would burst open, but then the light dimmed.  With an anticlimactic mechanical whirring, the machine spat out not a polaroid, but a card.  It was bigger than a playing card or even a tarot card, almost as big as a heavy hardcover book, in fact just small enough to fit inside it.  The back was red trimmed with gold, emblazoned with stars, the sun and the moon, and the Clow Circle.  The front held a snarling, stylized image of Raiju, and was titled simply

THE THUNDER

“Looks like you didn’t need my help after all,” Syaoran said bashfully.

“Sure I did,” Tomoyo said, not skipping a beat.  “Without you he’d have eaten me right at the start!  I need to learn battle magic like you have.”  She fluttered her eyelashes.  “Can you teach me?”

After an hour or two of showing the girl how to use his chants and draw Li clan spell tags (strictly forbidden but hey she was pretty, er, it would be useful to be on good terms with the true card captor if things went south for him, that’s it).  “Okay,” said Tomoyo, as she finally repeated the Chinese spell correctly, without a hint of accent, “I think I’m ready to try it for real!”

Syaoran shook his head.  “It took me a long time to get to that point, it’s dangerous—”

Suddenly, the girl was very close to him.  “I never did tell you my name,” she purred, those huge eyes sparkling like amethysts.  “I’m Tomoyo.”  Her voice was cute and light, and as she let out that last syllable she tilted her head, quick enough to make that long silky hair bounce, and Syaoran melted.  “Syaoran Li,” he muttered.

She touched his arm again, his sword arm.  “It’s so big~,” she said, eyes goggling.  “Can I touch it~?”  There was not a hint of anything that was not innocent in her voice, or her face, or any part of her at all except the exact angle and pressure she was exerting on his arm.  As far as Syaoran was concerned, she could have said literally anything, and he would have simply mumbled a “yes”.

Tomoyo slid her hand down Syaoran’s arm and gently, hesitantly, as if she were frightened, took the sword.  Her hands were shaking with excitement.  She took a few practice swings—

And buried it in his chest.  “Sweet dreams motherfucker,” she said, driving the weapon deeper, “you can dream of my sweet sunshine _in Hell.”_

Tomoyo withdrew the sword and wiped it clean with a flourish as the lifeless body fell to the floor.  “Kaishen shourai!” She shouted, placing a paper charm on her blade just like he’d taught her.  It became a fireball and engulfed the corpse.  

Tomoyo sauntered away, swaying as she walked, sword up on her right shoulder and camera cradled under her left arm.  She whistled a merry tune that was something like _“Les toreadors”_ and something like _“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”_.  Much as she loved and adored her sweet precious dear Sakura, she may have found something almost as good to occupy her time.  Being a magical girl in her own right was going to be...interesting.

A man with powerful sideburns and salt-and-pepper Wolverine hair sat upon a throne of red jade high atop a podium, glaring down through a monocled eye in disdain.  His massive robes trailed over the sides of the chair and pooled at his feet like an elegant waterfall of blood.  “Do you know why you have been called here?” he asked.

A hooded figure knelt far below.  She looked up and he saw a soft, round face set with ruddy eyes like garnets.  “To avenge him,” she spat.

The man nodded.  “Rise as my apprentice, Meilin Li.”  Both he and the child rose to their feet.

“Sakura Kinomoto must die,” she growled.

Across a sea, Tomoyo’s ear twitched.  “Why do I feel the sudden need to slap a bitch?” she wondered.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to punish a friend of mine for having a social life, but it was super fun. This may be the second fic I’ve written that isn’t Homestuck, and frankly it shows all the Card Captor fans are going to crucify me for what I’ve done I bet.  
> I have not seen this show in _millennia,_ though I remember loving it to pieces. I have a few manga volumes but have yet to read through them. Mind you I still did extensive research on the characters and watched a couple episodes (I’d have read those mangas if it hadn’t been late, and I too tired to look for them) in order to refresh myself on this childhood classic before even attempting to ruin it.  
>  Blood Opera is a subgenre of Hong Kong action movies. This is not technically a Blood Opera because none of the characters are cops, but the themes of violent revenge will remain true. Also it just sounds cool, okay?


End file.
